Instead of strict/forced rule enforcement, psychiatrist dad Richard Wadsworth opts for incentivized autonomy. In order to get screen time, his teens have a chore list they must complete first. They are free to do the items whenever they want – including getting up early at 6:30am to do a workout so they can have more time later. This teaches his kids how to make their own choices for the goals they want and regulate their own behaviors.
I got my start in programming with type-in BASIC programs. Back in the 80’s, almost every computer had BASIC built-in, but almost no kid could afford games. Or even get them – the nearest store that sold software from me was over 30 miles away. Mail order took 2-3 weeks. On top of that – kids are notoriously broke. What I did have was a library, and plenty of time.
Enter Compute! magazine. After ravenously devouring all the programming books our small Carnegie library had, I branched into magazines. BYTE was too news oriented and didn’t have type-in programs; though reading about the technology was fun. When I found Compute! – I was hooked. I eventually checked out just about every single magazine they had a dozen times over. I remember digging in the downstairs old issue stacks in search of any I might not have seen. I spent whole weekend afternoons typing the programs in – and then even more hours debugging each line to figure out where I’d gone wrong.
Nate Anderson recently wrote an article about those early days of type-in programs. Even more fun is the comments section full of people sharing their similar experiences.
With the internet and instantly available content and content development tools – it makes me wonder how the next generation’s engineers will develop. How will the instantly available world of free software and tools shape them compared to our generation of type-in programmers?
Thankfully, all these wonderful magazine scans have been saved in the Compute! Magazine Archive on the Internet Archive. I even sat down and typed one in (well – heavily utilized OCR as well!). What a blast.
When the poster child of quirky liberality calls your BS out, maybe you should listen? On a recent visit to Portland, David Sedaris got very little sympathy when he experienced the same thing many of us living here do every day. One of the increasingly rampant unleashed dogs belonging to a homeless person attacked and bit him.
How did Portlander’s respond to his bandaged leg? Victim shaming:
“You have to understand that these addicts, especially those with an opioid-use disorder, lead incredibly difficult lives,” the first person I spoke to, a woman with long, straight hair the color of spaghetti, said.
“How is that an excuse?” I asked. “Her dog bit me.”
“Well, you’re still better off than she and her friends are,” the woman continued.
Unfortunately, I had already finished signing her book.
He’s got the same treatment down the line – which has been exactly my experience when talking to Portlanders about these things too. You’ll get preach at about how much better off you are and how the behavior is justified. So you getting bit by a dog, your car getting stolen, your house broken into, hit by a driver with no insurance, or you getting assaulted by someone having a mental health crisis is your privilege speaking.
Sadly, he not even remotely the first. Increasingly large numbers of people are being attacked, mauled, and permanently disabled/disfigured by dogs owned by homeless in Portland. David Sedaris got pretty much the exact same response from ‘compassionate’ Portlanders that others permanently injured get: the lives of homeless folks are worse off than yours so you should shut up. The poor dogs are the focus here (certainly more important than you).
When is quantum cracking going to happen? Much sooner than bitcoin owners would like
Q-Day is the day when classical computational cryptography we use today is slated to be obsolete, because quantum computers will finally be powerful enough to crack them. It is likely to have a similar effect as the Y2K crisis in that many digital security systems are not using quantum cryptography safe algorithms. The good news is that people can, and are, starting to fix things now. The bad news is that when it happens, the effects will be very immediate and catastrophic. Even that, however, is only half the story. We knew exactly when Y2k would happen (January 1, 2000 at 12:01am), but we don’t know when Q-day will hits us – until it’s already happening.
Konstanitinos Karagiannis provides one of the best, fullest discussion of the upcoming crisis. He gives a much clearer idea of when quantum computers will be able to break just about all existing cryptography – including all the encryption underlying Bitcoin and other online digital currencies. And it’s much sooner than people were thinking even 2 or 3 years ago. Like fusion power, it was always thought Q-day was 10-20 years away. It’s certainly what bitcoin promoters will tell you.
The summary?
The NIST says that all systems should have switched to quantum computing safe security algorithms by 2035 – but Konstanitinos says it’s MUCH more likely that we’ll see real quantum cracking happen sometime at early as 2027 based on the recent rapid developments in quantum computing and algorithm improvements. He points out its likely to start from government backed security agencies or very powerful, well funded organized crime groups.
What does this mean? It means any companies not updated to quantum secure cryptography will have computing systems almost completely vulnerable to having financial accounts emptied, customer data stolen, system take-overs or destruction, and ransom attacks. Secure emails and chat communications will be perfectly readable and usable for blackmail or extortion. Secure government and military communications will become vulnerable to infiltration. Infrastructure systems from airline traffic control, public transit, water systems, government computing services, to power systems become vulnerable to ransom attacks, havoc, and destruction.
It also means bitcoin and all digital currencies based on elliptical encryption/similar algorithms are very likely to drop from their current values to zero within hours after the first confirmed cracks happen. Clever attackers will likely crack a large number of digital wallets quietly over weeks and months by simply capturing the encrypted transaction data, and then flash-liquidate as many wallets as they can before the scheme is discovered and values go to zero. It’ll likely happen in less than a day. North Korea, even without quantum computing, already is doing this to the tune of billions per year.
You’re not even safe now. It’s also highly likely governments are using record-now-crack-later strategy of recording secret communications and bank transactions now so they can uncrack them later when quantum computing is cheap and easy. It’s very likely we’ll see it used for extortion in just a few years when everyone’s communications, web traffic, and bank transactions become public knowledge. If you thought Wikileaks revealed a lot of stuff, wait until governments and organized crime groups unencrypt years worth of recorded traffic.
He also covers the good points. There are cryptographic algorithms that are secure from quantum attack – which you should be using today. He also outlines how we will detect if people are using quantum computers to crack things by describing the current cracking algorithms and their telltale signatures.
Still – quantum cryptographic cracking is likely to be like lightening from the blue. Everything will be fine until it’s discovered to be happening. It’s very possible that literally trillions of dollars could be stolen in the matter of hours or days.
Fluxfox is a floppy disk image library – written in Rust. It’s intended to serve the needs of the emulator world and supports IBM, Amiga, Macintosh, and Atari ST formats. It can even perform operations on disk images consistent with typical operations of a PC floppy disk controller, while also giving low-level access to the track bitstream for other controllers.
Back in the day, software didn’t come on encrypted, online, distributed marketplaces, they came on humble floppy disks. This made them susceptible to copying. To fight this, developers started using all kinds of interesting tricks, which hackers would try to break. Thus started a nearly decade-long war of hackers and copy protection schemes.
I particularly like his article about Copy-Lock mechanism used by Kings Quest. Copy-Lock employed several tricks such as sectors with non-standard sizes and putting purposefully incorrect CRC values on tracks to make standard copying incorrect.
In this case, Copy-Lock used a mechanism in which sector 1 on track 6 was intentionally written as only 256 bytes (instead of 512 bytes), with a 256-byte blank section to fill the gap. Additionally, the CRC was also altered to make a normal read think it was invalid. A normal INT 13h disk read would search and fail the read and CRC check.
CopyLock worked by bypassing the BIOS and talking directly to the disk controller. It would issue an INT 13h read on sector 1 track 6 that it knew would fail. This would place the head on the right track. The code would then tell the floppy controller directly to read track – and dump all 512 bytes. It was looking for the special byte 0xF7 as the final byte of that supposedly empty section of the track. The key is that it is not possible to create invalid tracks with invalid CRC’s like this using a standard IBM PC floppy controller. Copy-Lock created the special hardware that could write in this way and sold that, along with the checking code, as their solution.
His article has all the assembly code – which is really awesome.
On what are we to keep our lives focused? It’s a good question during Advent.
Dear Wormwood, Be sure that the patient remains completely fixated on politics. Arguments, political gossip, and obsessing on the faults of people they have never met serves as an excellent distraction from advancing in personal virtue, character, and the things the patient can control. Make sure to keep the patient in a constant state of angst, frustration, and general disdain towards the rest of the human race in order to avoid any kind of charity or inner peace from further developing. Ensure the patient continues to believe that the problem is “out there” in the “broken system” rather than recognizing there is a problem with himself. Keep up the good work.
Recognize what is in your circle of concern and your circle of control. By keeping focus and energy on things that are in your circle of control, you stay focused on what you can actually do and avoid needless worry about things you cannot control. This focus helps you create real momentum towards goals and reduces a sense of victimhood and blaming others for problems you can neither control nor influence. You can sometimes change or move things that are outside your control in the circles of interests/concern with proper evaluation and effort, but recognizing when you do not have control over a situation keeps you from useless worry and concern about things and people you cannot change.
Stephen Covey
This all matches the central teach of Christ which was even more soul-centered. Right after teaching that one need only have complete trust in the Father’s love and care for them, he tells them the same advice: keep your circle of interest completely encapsulated in your circle of control. Even moreso, justice means that measure you hold against others will be held against you. So stay focused the Father’s love for you and rooting out the evil that keeps you from loving all others.
1“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. 2 For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.
3 “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? 4 How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? 5 You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.
Stargazers Ghost Network, an extensive network of GitHub accounts and repositories that provides malware distribution “as-a-Service”, has created ‘GodLoader’ which hides in Godot engine .pck files as a Godot script – and then downloads malware when activated.
Utilizing a network of ghost accounts, they distribute all kinds of malware by relying on users browsing github and downloading Godot tools and engine cheats. To obfuscate things, they used more than 200 repos with more than 225 ghost accounts – each with a slightly different purpose in the entire distributed scheme. Researchers note the script method works across Windows, MacOS, and Linux since the Godot engine works across those platforms too.
Victims were often infected with cryptocurrency miners or RedLine infostealer. The method is good – it still remains undetected by many antivirus tools.
One more reason to put github projects you download into VM’s before giving them access to your dev environment.
